For those (un)fortunate people that aren’t hip hop bloggers, MURS is easily one of the best interviews you could be lucky enough to snag.

Given MURS’ forever-present sense of humor and insanely humble demeanor, it’s sometimes pretty easy to forget that the dude is a living, breathing legend. There is no talking about West Coast rap in the last 20 years without bringing up his name, and his contributions to hip hop outside the regular album format are just as numerous as those within it.

With ¡MURSDAY! fresh in our ears and a national tour in the midst, The Hundreds caught up with MURS to speak on his coming up as a rapper, his current situation with Strange, and some upcoming projects fans can anticipate.

Among the more interesting facts revealed in this interview is that MURS basically started rapping to keep himself from getting beat up:

I first started freestyling when I was living in Lynwood with my step-brother – his friends were always rapping, they would punch me and beat me up and be like, “If you don’t rap we’re gonna beat you up!” So my brother would make me rap with his friends [laughs], then from there, trying to like change the lyrics to LL Cool J songs and make them my own [laughs].

We’re also given some insight into why MURS chose to make Strange Music his home after having so much success elsewhere:

I’ve been a fan of Tech for a while and I called Strange to try and get Tech on Paid Dues and they said you should come out and visit. I was like, “Nah, it’s coo. You can just show up to the show, I don’t need to come out [laughs] and he’s like, “No, you need to come out and see what we got going on.” So I went and saw the offices and I’m like, “HOLY SHIT!” [Laughs] And they used the opportunity to present me with an opportunity. One of the first artists to ever be like “Yo, okay you did this for me, let me do this for you.” He took me on tour with him and paid me well. I was like, “Fuck man, that’s solid.”

The Hundreds go on to extract tons of interesting information from the left coast veteran in their interview which you can check out by clicking HERE.

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• What was your favorite part of the interview?
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